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Serverwake Free

A minimal service watchdog for Ubuntu servers.

Serverwake Free watches a built-in catalogue of delivery-layer services — nginx, PHP-FPM, Redis, MariaDB, Docker, ClamAV, Fail2ban, and similar — and restarts them if they fail. That is the entire product. No dashboards, no alerts to tune, no integrations to wire up. Just a binary that runs forever and restarts what breaks.

It is the free, Apache-2.0-licensed version of a larger paid product. It is not crippled; it is complete for its scope.

What it watches

A built-in catalogue of common delivery-layer services:

• Web servers: nginx, apache2
• Application runtimes: php*-fpm, gunicorn, uwsgi
• Caches and data stores: redis-server, memcached, mariadb, mysql, postgresql@*-main
• Containers: docker
• Security and integrity: clamav-daemon, fail2ban
• File transfer: pure-ftpd
• Process supervision: supervisor

Entries with * are globs: php*-fpm matches php8.3-fpm, php8.4-fpm, and so on. At startup, Serverwake resolves the catalogue against systemd and watches only the services that are present.

Serverwake does not watch OS plumbing (systemd-*, dbus, cron, rsyslog, getty, polkit, ssh) or hardware management (ModemManager, multipathd, udisks2). If those fail, the system is unhealthy — that is out of scope for a service watchdog.

What it does

On every 60-second tick, Serverwake checks each watched service. If a service is in the failed state, it is restarted. Nothing else happens.

Deliberate stops are respected. If you run systemctl stop nginx, Serverwake does not restart it. Only failed services are restarted. Only interventions are logged.

Download

What is in the tarball

serverwake-free-v1.0.0-linux-amd64/
├── serverwake-free              (the binary)
├── serverwake-free.service      (systemd unit)
├── serverwake-free.logrotate    (log rotation config)
├── README.md                    (install, use, uninstall)
├── LICENSE                      (Apache 2.0)
├── CHANGELOG.md
└── SHA256SUMS                   (hashes of all files above)

Verify the download before installing:

sha256sum serverwake-free-v1.0.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz

The output must match the SHA256 above.

Install

Four commands. Run as root.

sudo install -m 755 -o root -g root serverwake-free /usr/local/bin/serverwake-free
sudo install -m 644 -o root -g root serverwake-free.service /etc/systemd/system/serverwake-free.service
sudo touch /var/log/serverwake-free.log
sudo chown admin:admin /var/log/serverwake-free.log
sudo chmod 644 /var/log/serverwake-free.log
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now serverwake-free

Replace admin:admin with the user and group that should own the log on your system. The service runs as root; the log is owned by you, so you can read it without sudo.

Install the logrotate config so the log rotates weekly:

sudo install -m 644 -o root -g root serverwake-free.logrotate /etc/logrotate.d/serverwake-free

Check that it is running

systemctl status serverwake-free

Read the log

cat /var/log/serverwake-free.log

The log contains only interventions — moments when Serverwake restarted a service, or tried to and failed. If the log is empty, everything is fine.

What it finds on a typical server

On a standard Ubuntu 24.04 web server running a common LEMP stack, Serverwake resolves the catalogue to something like:

nginx
php8.x-fpm
redis-server
memcached
mariadb
fail2ban
pure-ftpd
supervisor

Eight services. That is what Serverwake watches. Every 60 seconds it checks each one, and if any is in the failed state, it restarts it and writes one line to the log.

On the same server, these catalogue entries may match nothing and are silently skipped:

apache2
gunicorn
uwsgi
mysql
postgresql@*-main
docker
clamav-daemon

They are in the catalogue because other servers run them. Serverwake is designed to work on any Ubuntu box with any combination of common delivery-layer services. It watches what is present and ignores what is not. No configuration required.

After installing or removing a service

The catalogue is resolved at startup. If you install a new version of a catalogued service (for example, php8.4-fpm alongside php8.3-fpm) or remove one, tell Serverwake to re-scan:

sudo systemctl reload serverwake-free

Serverwake will re-resolve the catalogue and log the new watch list. This is not automatic — by design. The sysadmin knows when the service landscape changes.

Uninstall

sudo systemctl stop serverwake-free
sudo systemctl disable serverwake-free
sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/serverwake-free.service
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/serverwake-free
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

The log file at /var/log/serverwake-free.log is left in place. Delete it manually if you want.

What it does not do

Serverwake Free deliberately omits:

• Configuration file (the catalogue is built-in)
• Dashboard, web or terminal
• Pause or resume
• Email, Slack, webhook, or any notification
• HTTP health checks
• Process-state or I/O monitoring
• Disk cleanup
• ClamAV self-tests
• Docker container restarts (only the docker service itself)
• System health checks (load, memory, disk)
• Suspension on degraded systemd state
• Telemetry, update checks, or any network traffic

Every one of these is either a paid-version feature or explicitly out of scope. The paid version adds a config file, a read-only dashboard, a TTY pause system, smart detectors, and vendor support.

Source code

The complete source code is included in the tarball and is also available for browsing. To build from source:

cd /path/to/serverwake-free
go build -ldflags="-s -w" -o serverwake-free .

Requires Go 1.25 or newer. No dependencies beyond the standard library.

Contributions are welcome by email. Send patches to free@serverwake.com.

License

Apache 2.0. See the LICENSE file in the tarball, or read it at apache.org.